The Problem
Currently we are working with our local religious center which provides cooked meals once a month at a homeless shelter in NJ and the second project is to provide rations to low-income families in the community.
Currently we are working with our local religious center which provides cooked meals once a month at a homeless shelter in NJ and the second project is to provide rations to low-income families in the community.
We are looking into other fundraisers in our town and canvassing local grocery stores asking for donations or discounts. We currently are working with some local stores and always looking for opportunities to get donations and funds. The mission is to fight hunger.
My Roots & Shoots Mini- Grant project was used to support my project towards Fighting Hunger. We worked through the Sadhu Vaswani center of East Brunswick, which provides cooked meals once a month at a homeless shelter in NJ and the second project is to provide rations to low-income families in the community. With the money from the grant I was able to support these two projects. We tried to gather donations in order to bring to these food drives and we were able to support a larger amount of people at the food drives. Normally there is a long line of people who wait for donations and there isn't enough food for the people at the end of the line. It was hard to be able to support larger crowds at these donations and so using the mini grant I was able to bring more donations. We ran a donation drive monthly where we looked to collect non-perishable items that could be taken to the shelters. We are currently still working on getting into touch with some local stores and looking for opportunities to get donations and funds from. I was able to buy sample items each month to incentivise people to donate items and explain what we needed. The money from the grant supported our goal to help fight hunger.
Through the project we learnt that we needed to better tap into different communities and get donations from a wider group of people.
I would change the way we advertised some of the drives. I would put up the flyers in more areas like libraries and circulate it in more communities so I could collect more donations.
My favorite part of the project was when we actually went to the drives and handed out the donations to the families.
Promote, Promote, Promote wherever you can and let everyone you know about the project you are doing.